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Colour and shading are interrelated in my head, so I'm afraid my feedback on both of those topics is very jumbled together:

Don't be afraid of having higher contrast in the skin and hair. Light-coloured objects can still have darkish shadows. You have good contrast on the clothing, but the shadows on the skin and hair are so light that they're barely visible.

Your flat colours seem to have some gaps in them, and in some spots the colours go outside of the lines. This sort of thing isn't difficult to fix, but makes a real difference for making your work look polish.

You don't seem to be shading with a light source in mind. Shadows are areas where light doesn't reach as much. So, if a light source is to the left of a character, the right side of them will generally be in shadow. Tight crevasses where light has trouble entering will also be in shadow (this is called "ambient occlusion"). It's all about where light can and cannot reach. Shading around the edges of each part of the character regardless of the location of the light source is a common mistake called "pillow shading."

Don't forget about the shading you added in the inking! The neck has a black shadow to the left, but the colours have the shadow on the right, a mismatch.

Shadows look best if they're not just darker versions of the base colour. The shadows for a white object don't have to be grey, the shadows for a blue object don't have to be (the same) blue. If you have ambient light in the scene (you can just pick a colour that looks nice, you don't have to have realistic light sources for everything), it would affect the colour of the shadows, all the shadows would have hues that are a little closer to that of the ambient colour, e.g. all a little bluer if the ambient light is blue, a little redder if the ambient light is red. Colouring the shadows this way gives the colours overall more life, and creates the look of more complex, natural lighting (in real life, there is almost never just one single source of light/colour, and light tends to bounce around and pick up the colours of things).

There are two general types of shadows: form shadows, which are just the shadows you get because light can't reach certain sides of an object, and cast shadows, which are shadows cast by one object onto another (i.e. one object blocks the light from reaching another). You seem to only be dealing with form shadows in this drawing. The skirt should cast a shadow on the legs, the head should cast a shadow on the hair, etc. Cast shadows do wonders for making a character or a scene look like it takes up physical space.

Colours in general look best if you avoid "pure" anything. Pure greys look dull and unrealistic (even grey scenes in real life usually have some colour to them, if only a little), pure violets and greens usually just feel too bright to exist as anything but neon lights. Use a mix of hues (e.g. blue-grey, blue-green or yellow-green), and try to avoid saturation at the extremes (i.e. no completely desaturated greys, no fully saturated colours).

On a related note, natural blonde hair is usually not pure yellow, but more of a very light brown. Warm/dull-reddish shadows tend to look best on that sort of hair, I think.

Here's a super-rough, messy edit where I tweaked some of the colours and shadows to give you an idea of what some of the above tips might look like if implemented:This isn't the "right" way to do things, you have lots of options, and there's always room for stylization. Just because I do something a certain way doesn't mean you have to.

Would you mind reusing a single thread? It's not required, but it's easier to give feedback with your other art to compare with, so people can see what you've improved, what feedback you've already received, etc. If you want, I could merge the threads.

eishiya wrote:Would you mind reusing a single thread? It's not required, but it's easier to give feedback with your other art to compare with, so people can see what you've improved, what feedback you've already received, etc. If you want, I could merge the threads.